


Outer Space & Other Lies

by QM_Vox



Category: Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine (RPG)
Genre: Blood and Violence, Blushing, Ficlet Collection, Gun Violence, Homelessness, Kaiju, Other, Philosophy, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:46:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27215140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QM_Vox/pseuds/QM_Vox
Summary: Seizhi Schwan goes looking for the person keeping him up at night, and makes friends with an unusual Rider.
Relationships: Chuubo & Seizhi Schwan, Leonardo de Montreal & Chuubo & Seizhi Schwan, Seizhi Schwan/OC
Kudos: 7





	Outer Space & Other Lies

**Author's Note:**

> This piece was originally written on Discord, wholly within the character limit for individual posts. This means, among other things, that it's going to spend a lot of time letting assumed familiarity with the setting do heavy lifting for it. I hope you enjoy, and please feel free to comment!

**ONE**

Only in Horizon could the general body that is We, The People decide that the gunshots which had started one night, when the setting Sun released a great deal of the residents from houses and basement and closets and coffins, and simply not stopped, could simply be ignored. Were there screams? No? Not the problem of the Public, then. If ball or bullet fell elsewhere in Town, that was hardly Horizon's problem.

It took awhile for Seizhi to decide it was their problem, though they started worrying the first night. But...

...Well...

It was close, was the problem. Close, and loud, and no one else seemed to much care, but after a fortnight of no real rest and falling grades at School, Seizhi had to do something, anything, just to make it stop. The fact that they found the Trick Shooter inside of an hour seemed vaguely unfair.

She was a tall, leggy thing, too much girl on not enough bones, leaning back against an old water tower and studying the sky with eyes that almost, but not quite, reflected it. Her hands caressed a carbine, a lever-action rifle with a cut-down, hexagonal barrel, which felt...odd. Not how a gun should feel. Peaceful, not deadly.

"Evening," the Trick Shooter said, before she raised her weapon up at the sky. Her hands blurred, smearing through space, and then the weapon was back at rest, and the sky had -

\- different - 

Stars. Not more. Not less. But rearranged, somehow.

In polite society, when people are rude, you become firm with them. Seizhi and 'firm' do not belong in the same sentence; they managed to get out, "I-I'd very much appreciate it if you c-could do this...elsewhere. Or maybe not so late."

"Why - oh. Oh! You sleep!" The Trick Shooter looked down from the sky and she seemed mortified. "I didn't realize anyone in this part of Town - I'm so sorry!"

"It's -" Seizhi's dignity rallied and stopped them from saying 'okay'. "What are you doing?"

"Practical learning," the Trick Shooter answered. "Where did outer space go?"

**TWO**

Seizhi was not ready to meet the Trick Shooter in broad daylight. She seemed wrong, somehow, sitting on the end of the pier in Fortitude - ninety-nine per cent leg by volume, her carbine holstered 'cross her back, hair gray and lustrous like silver just before it turns. 

She gave Seizhi that dazzling smile, color splashing off her teeth like from a prism, and patted the pier next to her. And Seizhi, who was not firm, went and sat next to her.

"Sleeping better?" the Trick Shooter asked. There was a line dangling from the end of her heavy boot, and sometimes it caused her spurs to jingle. "I've been trying to keep my eye on the noise problem."

"A bit, yeah," Seizhi allowed. "A-at least as far as...the noise."

She quirked a just-off-silver eyebrow at them, and Seizhi's face turned the sorts of colors fit to give passers by the wrong idea about this conversation.

"...I don't sleep well in general," they admitted at length, breaking under the gentle interest of the shooter's gaze.

"Me either," she admitted, looking back out over the water. "You ever gaze out across all of Is and Could Be and Is Not, see something true, and then wake back up as an obligate night owl with a morning person's internal clock?"

"Not lately!"

She laughed a laugh like spent shells falling, a laugh like the bow after all the balloons have been blasted away, a laugh like the click-whirl of a spinning cylinder. "I can't shake it. I want to be awake at dawn and go to bed at dusk. Sucks, right?"

Something yanked at the line on her boot; the Trick Shooter had her carbine out in that same smearing motion, barrel wrapping up the line and yanking. The fish that came bursting out of the water was silver and blue and thrashing, and for a moment Seizhi thought - well, it doesn't matter what they thought. The shooter inspected it for a moment, apologized, and threw it back in.

"Was learning something worth it?" they asked.

"Nah. Things that are true kinda...blow, actually."

**THREE**

Finding the Trick Shooter on purpose was harder than Seizhi expected. 'Working on the noise problem'; the Schwan teen couldn't even see her muzzle flash, despite their neighbors' constant grumblings about the continual noise of gunfire while they were about their nightly duties. In the end, Seizhi ended up following the subtle rustle of spurs, after a few false starts involving ghosts, a retro-fashionable vampire, their brother, and in the last case, a small bat trapped between a fence and a wall. 

She was on top of a water tower, up high, with nothing between her and the naked sky but the stars. Seizhi made the climb up and sat, heavily, behind her. Something about the Trick Shooter suggested that right now, her personal space extended further than Town's environs.

"I forget to turn off the gun?" she asked at last. Seizhi couldn't see her firing, but they could see the sky rearranging itself. 

"N-no, I can't hear it - I got you something. Here."

She holstered her weapon. Seizhi slid their backpack over, nearly spilling out the contents; thick sheafs of comics about astronauts and stellar samurai and -

\- oh God. The Trick Shooter was crying.

"Can't have been cheap," she managed, delicately picking up one of the comics; she completely bypassed the fantastical and cradled The Eyewitness Guide to Space Shuttles, clutching it to her lean body like a talisman. "They're beautiful."

"Y-you like them? I wasn't sure what outer space was but I grabbed everything that had that name in it..."

"It's my favorite story," the Trick Shooter whispered. "Once upon a time there was Nothing, and inside it were great engines of fire. Humans didn't believe in them, so they told stories about gods, and monsters, and holes in the fabric of the world-that-is. But then we found them! The great engines, and we loved them, and we called them beautiful."

"What happened to that story?" Seizhi asked, sailing past the 'we'.

"It wasn't true," she whispered. "So it died."

**FOUR**

The Trick Shooter was crying. What to do, what to do, what to -

Seizhi made the key mistake of needing to help so bad that they forgot about the shooter's extended personal space; their attempt to reach out for the starry-eyed lass was arrested by a heavy, hexagonal barrel pressing under their chin, tilting their head back with ice-cold authority.

The Trick Shooter's eyes flowed with tears, and they were not unkind, but they did look at Seizhi with icy hurt, and fear, and need.

"Please don't touch me," she murmured, and then the gun smeared back into its holster. "...I'm sorry for pointing that at you."

Seizhi's dignity prevented the words 'it's okay'.

"Was it loaded?" Seizhi asked. In answer, the Trick Shooter took her weapon back out much more slowly. She worked the lever action with a strangely satisfying sound; Seizhi saw a star wink out, in the corner of their eye, and then something bright and gleaming was chambered in the gun. Something twinkling, and distant, and beautiful.

"No," the Trick Shooter answered, before she fired the star back into the sky. "...Someone's coming. They don't approve of me being here, in Town. And I'm scared. Of dying, a little. Of going where they want me to go, which is probably worse. I like it here."

Seizhi let out a long breath. Was that their own heart, trying to break out of their ribs from the inside. "Do you want help?"

"You willing to watch me die?"

When Seizhi didn't answer, the Trick Shooter scooped up her comics, shuffling them into her coat. The Schwan teen tried to open their mouth and say something, anything. It was only after the Shooter had dropped off of the roof and arrested her fall with an almighty, unloaded rifle blast that Seizhi managed to say anything at all.

They stared up at the night sky, and murmured: "It's full of stars."

**FIVE**

Chuubo was On The Case. Why exactly he did not know. Possibly he should have asked! But there was a Case, and he was Upon It, as a Rabbit Upon The Lettuce, with equal cunning and guile.

"Leo, what's outer space?"

Leonardo turned around. The first automatic response - no talking until you're done with your test - was interrupted by the absolutely impossible feat of Chuubo having completed his test already and turned it in. He'd cleaned his desk, put his books away - Headmaster's own boxers this might actually be important.

And so Leonardo deigned to give Chuubo his fifth-most acidic, "Why do you ask?"

"Seizhi asked me, and I didn't know, so I thought I'd ask the smartest person I could think of."

Well. That transparent bit of flattery and manipulation absolutely, positively launched Leonardo into an impromptu lecture that began by dragging Chuubo, ear-first, out of the classroom, snatching at a pair of hall passes on the way out from a teacher who had long since learned to just take the L and bow out as long as the work was done. Leo's words ripped past Chuubo's mind like a monsoon, but, much as a boy caught in a monsoon, that mind did indeed get wet. An impression of size was left on the boy, along with scale, and somehow being both very empty, yet very full?

"And it was important?" he asked, when Leonardo finally hit the point at which the need to breathe won out over the need to lecture.

"Important? No, not really. Well, maybe. To Earthlings and such."

"But people loved it?"

A complicated expression fought its way towards Leo's face and lost to an automatic scowl. "I wouldn't know."

The scientist was left to splutter and shout when Chuubo kissed him on the cheek and ran off with a trailing "Thanks!"

**SIX**

Trying to invite the Trick Shooter somewhere was an exercise in social minefields. Horizon? Seizhi could just find her in Horizon.

"Bluebell Park!" Chuubo suggested.

Fortitude - Seizhi discarded it. Something about the peace there felt wrong for her, incompatible with her own odd feeling of peace. Spelunking in Old Molder maybe?

"Bluebell Park!"

"Chuubo," Seizhi begged, and then borrowed one of their brother's favorite jokes. "Don't make me kill again."

"Fiiiiiiine. Bookstore crawl in Arcadia."

That - worked, actually. Which just left the actual work of going to rooftop after rooftop and leaving invitations on each, cordially inviting 'Horizon's Gunman' to an afternoon shopping with friends old and new, meals courtesy of her hosts. Seizhi and Chuubo were armed with lemonade and hiking snacks prepped right out of an old Boy Scout manual the latter had managed to buy off a boy in a mirror. Chuubo was armed with an irrepressible urge to tease his friend.

"You sure this isn't a Bluebell Park thing?"

To say that Seizhi smacked their friend with a stack of invitations would imply that they had the energy left for force after six hours of climbing and careful placement of paper. "She just...needs a friend right now, and I don't want in her personal space if she doesn't want me there. I think I really hurt her feelings last time."

Chuubo nodded solemnly. "I," he began with great gravity, "will make sure she gets the good mall food."

Seizhi laughed. It was a thin, pained laugh, but it was true.

'Things that are true blow, actually', floated into their mind, and stayed there the rest of the day through.

**SEVEN**

It was like watching a kitten having its very first outdoor experience on an autumn day.

The Trick Shooter danced from shelf to shelf, making little jangly twirls that rustled her spurs, looking at this book and that one, reading dust jackets and blurbs with all the holy seriousness of a priestess. A lot of the books seemed to be about this 'outer space' thing, or involve it somehow, though some did not.

There was a brief detour into the adult section of each bookstore, which turned Seizhi every color of red you could turn a human person, and caused Chuubo to do things with his eyebrows at them which were possibly not things human people could do with their eyebrows.

Eventually hunger won out over enthusiasm, and the three collapsed around a grease-sheened pizza that promised a lingering and painful death in the future.

Seizhi made it through two pieces before they worked up the courage to say what was on their mind: "Is it...is it okay if I ask about what we talked about before?"

The Shooter blew on her slice and, after a moment, nodded. Her hat was hanging from her neck, down on her back, like a real cowgirl. Freed of it, her hair seemed to have other ideas about the air movement in the mall than the mall did.

"It's...I mean - I don't even know your name. But I can't just - not if I could help you not do that. That wouldn't be right."

The Trick Shooter raised an eyebrow at them. "And it'd be right for me to ask a kid to die next to me?"

"I can't be that much younger than you!"

"Eighteen," she asserted.

"Yeah! You're talking a lot of trash for someone in puberty range!" Chuubo interjected. The Trick Shooter tried to laugh and swallow her pizza at the same time and found a happy middle ground by choking to death.

Seizhi thumped her back. "S-so why don't we start with the name thing? I'm Seizhi, and this is Chuubo."

"I have a name," the Shooter admitted after a second. "But it's true, so I don't like it."

"You're Stella now," Chuubo said.

"Works."

**EIGHT**

The pizza was dwindling. Somewhere along the way fries had blossomed on the table thanks to the power of catgirl maids. The Trick Shooter considered the question 'who brought this to the maid cafe' and decided, in light of her enlightenment, that she did not want to know.

"So what's it mean when you say something is true?" Chuubo asked.

The Trick Shooter - Stella - set her elbow on the table and pointed at the boy. "How badly do you want to know?"

"I asked, right?"

Seizhi turned those red colors again. "Ch-Chuubo, I think that's her way of saying she doesn't want to tell you."

"Is that right?" Chuubo was all wide-eyed concern.

"Said what I said," Stella told him, and then she stole his entire plate of fries - the good shit, with the vinegar and flaky sea salt and nacho cheese and everything. 

Chuubo crossed his arms over his chest, now Offended, Like Unto The Rabbit, and with equal cunning and guile. "Is Town true?"

"Pfft, no. Try a harder one."

"The Sun is true," Chuubo asserted.

"Wrong." Damn but these fries really were good. Stella'd thought you had to make it through a carnival past the organ-leggers to get fries like this. Arcadia needed to get a visit from her more often.

"Chuubo, quit it," Seizhi asserted, only to get ignored.

"I'm a boy!"

"Gender's a construct."

"You have a gun?"

"There is no such thing as guns."

One would like to say there was a hushed silence, but Stella's fries were crunchy and she did not stop eating them while Chuubo invested all of his brain power into his coup de grace.

"My name is Chuubo! You said names can be true."

"Sure did." Bite. Crunch. Swallow. "Yours isn't."

**NINE**

When the Trick Shooter - Stella - looked up from one of her new books a couple of afternoons, and not as much sleep as that time implies, later, it was to Seizhi finally looking firm. More than firm; angry. She marked her place and closed her book, and she waited. The two looked at one another for a long time, the autumn breeze on the rooftops whipping their hair this way and that.

"Do you even know why I'm mad?" Seizhi demanded at last.

Stella sighed and looked away, over the tangled daylight shadows of Horizon. "I warned him. You warned him. You warned him twice, even."

"D-don't bullshit me!" That got Stella's attention fast; Seizhi almost didn't seem like they believed they'd just swore. "Chuubo's been having an existential crisis for days now because of what you said! He slept at the library last night! You need to go apologize."

"I did tell you that things that are true mostly blow."

"What, so you've gotta blow too?" The words came out hot and accusatory, and Stella could see the righteous indignation and the immediate regret warring behind Seizhi's eyes. The Trick Shooter's face colored, for the first time since Seizhi had met her, and both of them deflated, a little. Tension blew away on the wind.

"...I want to help," Seizhi continued in a gentler voice. "You shouldn't have to be afraid. But I'm afraid all the time and I don't take it out on people who have nothing to do with it."

"Okay." Stella's murmur was barely louder than the breeze. "I'll find him. That's a private sort of talk. In the meantime, so he can...I dunno. Sleep in his own bed tonight, tell him..."

Seizhi listened close.

"...Tell Chuubo that 'true' and 'valuable' aren't the same things, and neither are 'true' and 'right'. That ought to help, some."

The Schwan teen nodded. "I did warn him," they allowed, after a moment. "I knew better than to ask."

"You could have." Stella flashed a flickering smile. "Yours is plenty true. And it doesn't blow at all."

**TEN**

"Do I want to know why you're perched on top of this ice cream truck?"

"The better question," Stella said in a lofty voice, "would be why everyone goes to the one ice cream truck in Creation that can't drive. But to answer the question you didn't ask, drama."

Chuubo hadn't seen Stella as often as Seizhi had, but he knew dark circles under eyes and frayed hair when he saw them; she hadn't been sleeping right. He paid for his ice cream, ostensibly a popsicle shaped like Spider-Man, and circled around to the back of the eternally parked truck to have a slightly more private conversation. Her spurs had already dug little gouges in the metal of the truck's back door.

"Seizhi get my message to you?" the Trick Shooter sounded almost concerned.

"Yeah. It did help."

"I'm sorry that I hurt you. I did it on purpose, which was shitty of me, but I shouldn't have done it at all. I. Get touchy, about true things." Stella's starry eyes drifted up, looking somewhere past Chuubo, and God but her hair really was a greasy, stringy mess, wasn't it? "...No, I get touchy about how people think and talk about true things. Like something's better just because it's true. Like false things are bad."

"Aren't they?" Chuubo asked. "At least, most of the time?"

Stella looked back down. "I dunno about you but I'm a big fan of mercy and porn and neither of those are remotely true."

The boy coughed in an effort to hide his lack of blush but the game was probably up days ago in the bookstores as far as that went, wasn't it?

"Do you need someplace to stay?" Chuubo asked. "I've got a shower and like, food. In my fridge and all."

"You willing to die next to me?"

"Not what I asked," Chuubo answered, setting his foot down firmly and crossing his arms over his chest.

Stella let out a long sigh. That feeling of peace around her didn't...collapse, exactly, so much as rustle and crinkle in a kind of emotional breeze.

"...Thanks. I could use a shower."

**ELEVEN**

On the list of Experts On Girls Who Are Not, Themselves, Of The Female Persuasion, one would not find Chuubo's name. Still, even by movie standards it felt like Stella's shower was taking awhile. She'd been singing for part of it, until she'd gone quiet, but the water was still running.

Seizhi'd be over soon, though, and maybe they might get her to actually give them some details on her problem. Chuubo had arranged for the holy sacraments: soda, pizza rolls, chips, and one of those ice cream buckets you could later repurpose for catching bugs! His last one had been tragically lost on a bug-catching expedition and had become more of a bug-releasing bucket in the process.

There was a knock on the door, which was odd, as Seizhi would not have knocked. Chuubo bounded over and opened it to -

\- Hhhhuh.

"Stella?" Chuubo called up the stairs.

"What?" she called back down. Her voice sounded oddly tight.

"I think you might have a visitor?"

"Love of - is it the fucking horse?"

It was indeed the horse, sexual status unknown, with big soulful eyes and no other flesh on its whole body. Just a whole, entire, skeletal horse. With eyes. Big black eyes.

"Tell it to go away!" Stella yelled.

Chuubo scoffed. "You're a cowgirl, you gotta have a horse!"

"I'm a space cowgirl!"

"Then where is your space suit?!"

"Chuubo I can and will drown you in this mixture of no-more-tears shampoo and my unrelated tears!"

The horse sighed like the wind through a graveyard, and Chuubo patted its long face. "I know buddy, she's difficult with me too."

"Can you tell her I have a message?" the horse asked in the most Accountant possible voice.

**TWELVE**

With the heaviest of all possible sighs and her hair still wrapped in a towel, the Trick Shooter set a wide bowl of Doritos down in front of what was, evidently, her horse.

"Why -" Seizhi began, but Stella held up a hand, not rudely but definitely firmly.

"May I eat?" the horse asked, still sounding like he was about to explain tax exemptions at the thinnest provocation.

A goofy grin played at Chuubo's lips. "Please do!"

Chips went flying. The skeletal steed ate Doritos the way an eleven-year-old drank orange juice. The crunching noises alone were war crimes.

"...Where are the chips going?" Seizhi asked after a moment.

"If I tell you that I have no idea, will you show the good sense to not ask me to find out?" Stella replied.

Both of the younger teens nodded slowly and turned their attention to their own snacks. None of the three of them could help but sneak glances at the horse, which swiftly abandoned the empty bowl to eat chip fragments off of the carpet.

"You wanna tell me what the message is, Jack?" Stella asked with some reluctance.

Jack whinnied. "The Bursar cometh, blade in hand. He found me in the vast Outside and turned me to you, to persuade you to come peacefully and take your rightful place in class."

Chuubo frowned in thought. "What's a bursar?"

"They handle the financials for colleges," Seizhi and Stella said at the same time. Stella flashed them a thumbs-up, Seizhi blushed and looked at Chuubo, and then decided looking at Stella was safer than confronting Chuubo's suggestive eyebrow motions. "I-I didn't think - why would - does the Bleak Academy even take money?"

The Trick Shooter shrugged. "I wouldn't know. I don't want to go there, which means I'm probably gonna have to kill a man. I really hope the two of you understand that I haven't been kidding about that."

"Excuse me," Jack asked. "Do you have the Mountain Dew? I wish to take the second sacrament and become a Gamer."

"...See, shit like this is why," Stella said.

**THIRTEEN**

Stella's frustration was a different beast from her dangerous amusement at the mall; the sleepless Rider sat on the couch with her knees to her chest, chewing on a wet strand of her own hair like if she could just digest it answers might fall out. Seizhi could not find a safe place to look at her; the Trick Shooter did not look right in the fluffy bathrobe she'd borrowed from Chuubo, which was too short for her lanky build. 

Her face? No, not with that scowl on, and her eyes all red from crying. Her wringing hands had defensive wounds nearly up to the elbows, and made Seizhi's heart hurt. Her long legs -

\- the teen turned their traditional red color and decided the face was not a bad option after all.

"So..." Chuubo began slowly. "Will this person um. Die. If you kill them?"

"Chuubo!" Seizhi said hotly.

"I have no idea." Stella admitted. "My sort of person can be bad at dying."

Seizhi bit their lip. "Will you die if he kills you?"

"I don't know."

"How -"

"I DON'T FUCKING KNOW!" Stella's voice was sharp with fear and frustration and edged with a despair that felt all too familiar to Seizhi Schwan, who was not firm. "You want to know how shit I am at being a fucking Rider? You two are the people I've caused the most harm to in my entire life. By any means! Might, magic, mayhem! Fucksake, I've never shot at anything moving!"

Chuubo reached a hand out and got a hexagonal barrel under his chin. The gun had not previously been in the room.

"Don't touch her," Seizhi said in a calming voice. "Stella. Please."

Slowly, Stella lowered her rifle and broke out in fresh tears, her shoulders shaking as she sobbed.

"Maybe Leo can help," Chuubo proposed.

Seizhi thought that over. "It might be better if I ask him. I-I don't want to hurt anybody either, and maybe he'll...I think I can make that a challenge for him."

"Just leave me alone. You're safer like that," Stella said into her knees.

"No," Seizhi said simply. "You'll have to kill me first."

**FOURTEEN**

"So we are...?"

Chuubo's chest swelled as he gripped his lapels like unto A Professor, but with far less stodgy bullshit, "Having a good day out on the town! I've got my savings and we're just gonna go around and do whatever."

Stella frowned. "Are you sure?"

"Sure I'm sure! It's absolutely imperative that you think of today as the day you have a good day!"

As it turned out, actively attempting to have a good day was a deeply confusing experience, but Stella couldn't deny that she had some fun for all that. They went fishing, swapped some to get a vendor to cook the others, went exploring through the streets of Old Molder. Something about Chuubo's enthusiasm was infectious, and had Stella smiling.

"So, Seizhi -" Chuubo tried to begin, on a high rooftop with the sun setting. He had ice cream in hand.

"I already noticed. And it's really rude for you to bring it up."

For once it was Chuubo who turned a red color. "Well. What about you?"

"I've known them for all of three weeks, all of which I've been in deadly fear of my life for, so even if I wanna kick me being older aside I think my primary emotions so far have been crying jags and screaming in terror."

The boy frowned. "You're selling yourself short."

Silence. Then: "True."

At the end of the street, a man in academic robes rounded the corner. The blade in his hand was an overlong letter opener, something not meant even to be a knife that was now doing duty as a zweihander. Chuubo and Stella froze.

"Still having a fun day?" he asked as the Bursar approached with steady steps.

"What? No!"

"Would a giant kaiju attack help you have a fun day?" Chuubo pressed, his eyes wide and desperate.

"Why in the fuck would that help me have fun?"

Chuubo hurled his ice cream from the roof. "Good!" he declared, before he jumped off after it and exploded into a gigantic snake in both directions.

Huh, Stella thought, before his expanding body stove her ribs in and she blacked out.

**FIFTEEN**

Seizhi had learned to expect a lot of things out of Leonardo de Montreal. Being a good listener was not one of them, but the nightmare scientist (he'd left behind 'mad' a long time ago when it was no longer servicing his needs) was quiet, and even attentive as Seizhi spilled their guts. Everything they knew about Stella and her problem, stopping only at certain points when Seizhi turned red in the face and swerved wide around some topics, and at others when Leonardo asked clarifying questions. Which was not to imply that Leo wasn't busy; he bustled in his lab, attending to this thing and to that, adjusting flames, pouring liquids, reading over drawings before going back to work.

"So that's the problem," Seizhi concluded. "I can't think of anyone who might be able to make the Bursar go away without hurting him."

Leonardo nodded, sucking something worrying into an eyedropper. "And so you have come to the master of impossible and incomparable deeds! I could solve this problem easily if I were available."

The Schwan teen's face and heart fell. "...Are you sure you're not available?"

"If I don't do this process correctly over the next forty-eight hours I'll level my house and most of this block, so I'm sure, yes."

"...Ah." Seizhi punched their own palm in frustration. "...We're not even sure how to stop him if we put killing him on the table! He's got, I mean. Truth."

"So?"

Seizhi looked back up at Leo and blinked in confusion. Leonardo, for his part, had the exact expression that Seizhi's teachers did when they realized that they and Chuubo had swapped homework to save Chuubo's grade.

"What is it you think truth is?" Leonardo asked.

"I - it's. True? It destroys false things?"

Leonardo laughed. It was an impressive mad scientist laugh, long and loud and right from the belly. "Headmaster's jockstrap, is that really what you think? I wish it were that easy! If lies were that fragile so much awful shit would never have had to be done!"

"...Oh. OH!"

**SIXTEEN**

Someone was yelling, and with the way her head hurt already the Trick Shooter was intent on fumbling for her rifle and ending that person. Why was the world so loud? Can you stop fucking yelling?

"She's awake, serpent." Not yelling.

Wait, that was the Bursar's voice.

Stella snapped awake to discover that her lack of being able to fumble for weaponry was due to being coiled up in the body of a massive snake. Its head blotted out the sun and left her in the cool shade, a small mercy considering how her body felt like it was on fire.

"Leave her alone!" the snake bellowed in Chuubo's voice but turned up to 11 with the dial snapped off. "I'll bite you! I swear I'll bite you!"

The Bursar sighed and shifted his letter opener to his other shoulder. This close, Stella could see the stars falling in his eyes. "You would die, serpent, when your fangs prove so large that they miss my body entirely and my blade pierces your brain. However, the Headmaster would be cross with me, and I did not come to sully his institution's prestigious reputation."

Stella coughed thick blood that was more tar and stars than anything human. "That's fucking rich," she rasped. "Sh-shall..." she heaved in a deep breath, which made her ribs burn like fire, "shall w-we meet in Bluebell Park?"

The Bursar considered this, and then nodded.

"Stella -" Chuubo started, looking at her, and then he stopped when he saw the agony his voice put her in.

"Tomorrow," the Trick Shooter insisted. "H-high n-noon."

"I name your horse as my second," the Bursar said simply.

"Y-you would. Ch-chuu-"

The serpent nodded hurriedly so she'd stop talking with that blood still leaking down her chin.

The Bursar nodded a second time, turned on his heels, and walked away.

"I-I'm g-g-going to need," Stella began, and stopped to cough and hack. "S-some serious drugs for this."

**SEVENTEEN**

Stella had not been kidding about not dying when killed. It was a long trip from Old Molder back to his Wish-Granting Engine and she hacked up tarry sludge of night sky the whole way there. Now, Chuubo, First Of His Name, was not a medical doctor, but sometime around the eighteenth gallon of fluid he started to suspect that she was bleeding out of some kind of cosmic obligation and not because, as it were, she had any blood.

Seizhi was waiting there, as the three had planned and agreed to, the better to arrange for a really awesome wish that might solve all of their problems, but the Schwan teen knew the moment they saw Stella that they were going to have to wish for something else.

"What happened?" Seizhi demanded.

"Y-your friend," she spat twinkling slime and heaved in a breath like a dying steam engine, "moonlights as a D-list Godzilla villain, is what."

"Chuubo! You know -"

"That it never helps I know, I know, help me set her down."

The two of them propped Stella up into a sitting position, and she rewarded them with her best groan of agony. The insane thought drifted through Seizhi's mind that her outfit was completely ruined now, that blood would never come out of it, and at that they got irrationally angry with themselves and Chuubo, in that order.

For his part, Chuubo was attending to the oddest machine Stella had ever seen in her short life, making parts go kla-clunk, click-clack, whirr, and most notably, weeeeeeeeee! 

Seizhi hovered uncertainly near her, until she reached up weakly and clasped their hand. "You gotta do more than k-kill me to m-make me die," she managed. "Wh-which is nice to know. I wasn't s-sure."

"Would your day be better if I said I learned something important from Leonardo? He suggested I phrase it as a question for you."

"M-make like a frat boy and f-f-fuck me up."

Seizhi turned red, but leaned in: "If what is true is so all-powerful, why did what is Not have to wage a war it did not win?"

**EIGHTEEN**

Later that night, Stella laid back on Chuubo's roof in the fluffy bathrobe that was not long enough, and Seizhi laid next to her. Chuubo's wish had repaired her body admirably, though it had done nothing for her clothes. The teen boy had gone out claiming to know a nocturnal tailor who would take his credit, and the Trick Shooter hadn't had the emotional energy to protest her pride.

Almost lazily, Stella aimed her carbine up at the sky and fired, filling the air with the scent of spent stardust.

"Still meditating?" Seizhi asked.

"Well. Not on that. I've got my plan and if I die, I die. No point worrying any further about it."

"...Wish I could do that."

The gunslinger laughed that falling-shells laugh. "One of the perks of true things, I think. Nah, I'm thinking about the bit where your friend seems to think you like-like me."

Seizhi froze. Then Stella flashed them an easy, comfortable smile, and they reached fry-an-egg levels of blushing.

"If it helps, I'd noticed before he said anything," Stella offered.

A thousand sentences whirled through Seizhi's mind, most of them automatic lies. What came out of their mouth was: "Wh-what if I d-do?"

"The stars are dog shit for romantic advice, so." Stella looked back up at the night sky. "...He agreed to be my second. Chuubo, that is. I kinda wish I coulda had you. Listen...I haven't been doing this for very long. And most of the time I've been doing this? I've been screaming internally. Just. Fucking terrified. You make me feel comfortable...but I'm not sure it's fair to you if I just. Make decisions based on that."

Seizhi nodded. The anticipated shattering of their heart into ten billion pieces failed to manifest. "M-maybe we can talk about it after? When you have time to feel safe. A-and a house."

"Yeah," Stella said wistfully. "...Yeah, a house would be nice. Thanks. For caring enough to talk to me. For...yeah."

"I couldn't imagine doing anything else."

"And you wonder why I'm kinda hot here."

**NINETEEN**

Stella was going to have to do something nice to thank this tailor. Her new leathers were soft and fit amazingly well despite having never seen or met their creator; black and silver they were, swarming with stars, and ready to ride with.

Of course, even in autumn, high noon was a hot time to be wearing all black. But ah well. C'est la morte.

The Bursar waited with Jack, the skeletal horse lapping at a deep bowl of, yeah, Mountain Dew. Chuubo stepped forward, dressed in his best (see: only) tuxedo, and did his best to Sound Official.

"Bursar of the Bleak Academy! Stella, the Trick Shooter, has come to settle her affairs of honor with you at the appointed time. Are you willing to negotiate a peace?"

The Bursar stepped forward, his letter opener across both shoulders, somehow both very small and absurdly large. "Peace? Even the name you call her blasphemes the True Thing she paid so dearly to have, only to spit in its face. I refuse and scorn all offers of peace with a Rider who claims no value in Truth. You wish to propose an antithesis? Very well. Defend your ideology as all students must, where all must see its worth."

Stella sighed; her weapon smeared into her hands, and she slung her backpack off of her shoulders. It hit the ground at her boots with a heavy sound.

"Are you sure you want to force me to hurt you?" the Trick Shooter asked carefully.

"I will have you in class in chains, stripling. To the yield?"

"Or inability to continue," Stella agreed. Jack, Chuubo, and Seizhi started edging away to gain a safe distance.

The Bursar dropped his blade to a ready position. "This will hurt."

"Truth usually does."

**TWENTY**

The Bursar advanced with the patient inevitability of the void. Stella held her weapon in both hands, 'cross her hips, wholly casual and unready.

The resulting clash of fighters took nearly a minute to happen. Chuubo yawned wide enough to unhinge his jaw entirely and have to discreetly put it back.

"Weird that you say I think and say the wrong things about truth," Stella opined as her opponent advanced with all the urgency of a slug evolving legs. "I, too, saw something true beyond the lands which are not. What do you think it means, that it wasn't your truth?"

"You will grow into the fullness of the True Thing with education," the Bursar explained. Left. Right. Left. Right. Plod. Trudge. "Do you truly intend not to defend yourself?"

"You just care about what you're doing, old man. You don't have to die my death."

"Each of us die every death that ever is."

"Please stop tempting me to die yours."

The Bursar struck like a snake the moment he was in reach - and tripped, falling ass over teakettle when Stella's heavy backpack impacted his knees. The gunslinger caught it with her foot on the way down and kicked it into the Bursar's back, forcing a whoosh of air from his lungs.

"You think that's air you're breathing?" Stella said; her voice was soft, low, with a dark urgency that stopped her friends from laughing at the obvious reference. "You can't fucking help it, can you? You walk on the ground and the ground is a lie. You breathe my air and the air is a lie. You fight in my sunlight and the light is a lie."

The Trick Shooter leaned away from a slash; the Bursar was on his feet without having moved, swinging his letter opener as if it weighed nothing, pressing the attack in silent hate. Sweat poured from his brow.

"What's happening?" Chuubo whispered to Seizhi.

The Schwan teen frowned. "...He's fighting with two handicaps. He needs her alive or the whole trip was for nothing."

**TWENTY-ONE**

It was like peering into a world in which the books of war had been written by the Three Stooges.

Seizhi worried their lip with their teeth as they watched Stella fight, heedless of the outbreak of blood from biting themself. The Trick Shooter kept up her odd defense as if she had not spent the last two and a half weeks sleeping only every three days or so; she swayed away from heavy blows from the Bursar, keeping her backpack between the two of them. She moved like starlight on water, rippling here, rippling there, disturbed only by the skip-rock splash of kicking her backpack into her opponent. Stella danced away from the Bursar's pratfalls, taking deep, steady breaths, her face as focused as Seizhi had ever seen it.

"Must," the Bursar growled between heavy breaths, "you mock even this? With the idiocy you hold so dear on the line?" He stood slowly, starry eyes on his opponent.

The look Stella gave him was strange and distant. "There was a girl once," she said in a gentle voice. "She didn't want much. Just a way to be somewhere else. Somewhere happier, and peaceful, and free. Where the people who hurt her couldn't. But instead of getting that, she saw something true."

"There was never a girl, stripling." The blade came up as the Bursar circled warily, his eyes flicking to the backpack he'd finally learned to respect. "You know this."

"Bold words from the man fighting her mausoleum." Stella moved her carbine into a ready position at long last. "Here is what she saw: true things are. That's all. Things are true, or they are untrue. And I wept on the cold night of my birth to know it. What kind of enlightenment is that?"

Seizhi's heart wrung in their chest. Those scars, up Stella's arms...

"I'm very good at telling when things are true," Stella murmured. "And your big talk about how truth is holy and worthy and the most important of all things?"

She kicked the backpack and it went sailing high, above both heads.

"False."

**TWENTY-TWO**

The Bursar swung in a wide arc, his letter opener cleaving through the backpack and the things inside. It exploded into tatters of cloth and paper - shiny paper, like -

"Those are the comics we bought her!" Chuubo exclaimed.

At the same time, from Seizhi: "My God, they're full of stars."

Stella's carbine went click-clack as she worked the lever action, and the brightness that was sucked from the falling pages and into her weapon's chamber forced Chuubo and Seizhi to look away lest they go blind. They heard a mighty gunshot, and the Bursar almost screaming louder than the sound of every bone in his body being broken to fine powder.

"Once upon a time," Stella said, her voice still low, still so very urgent, "there was Nothing, and inside of it were great engines of fire. They're gone now, but I still love them."

Click-clack.

"I," the Bursar groaned, and then he shrieked. Seizhi risked looking and saw Stella's carbine, wreathed in every color of fire, warping space around it with a great weight that seemed to dwarf even Town around it, pressed against the Bursar's boneless skull. His scorched skin frayed from the heat.

"I know I only won because you were holding back," Stella said in a soft voice. "But you did, and now you are at my mercy, which is not true. You will vow on the True Thing beyond madness and fear that you will leave Town and never return to it, or I will nail you to the sky with chains of star-stuff and lull myself to sleep every morning with your screaming."

"I yield," the Bursar croaked, and Stella raised her weapon to the blue, sunny sky, and emptied it into the heavens before trudging, worn and drained, to her friends.

"Is it over?" Chuubo asked.

Stella nodded. "For now. Thank you both." She reached a burnt hand out for Seizhi's and squeezed it, a soft smile playing on her lips. "Now if you'll excuse me the adrenaline is wearing off and I have something important to do."

Seizhi and Chuubo yelped as their friend fainted.

**TWENTY-THREE**

Days and weeks poured past like water; many were spent with Stella on Chuubo's couch recovering, sometimes croaking out apologies for ruining her friends' beautiful gifts. More comics and books piled up around her despite her protestations.

"It's our money," Seizhi had pointed out eventually, and that was that.

As the autumn turned late, and drizzly, gray and miserable and glorious, Stella moved into a flat in Fortitude, just above a bakery whose owner had been obligated to move in with the shrine family to which her lovely bride belonged. The three dropped gently out of touch, not separated but choosing to honor Stella's unspoken need for space - to think, and to breathe.

She'd left Seizhi with some of her non-stellar comics from Arcadia. They could not read those without blushing, not just from the content but from the risque knowledge of sharing in something Stella...liked-liked.

This gentle separation lasted until Chuubo, breathless and red-faced, had burst into Seizhi's room through the window clutching comics in his hands, with Stella's name where the authors' and artists' ought to be.

"Wow. You really got into this," Seizhi observed as Stella invited them into her living room, which was full of the tools of her trade and half-written comics. "...You can keep your favorite story alive."

Stella nodded. "Not unchanged, but that isn't the same as bad. Hey Chuubo, could you do us the briefest of favors and fuck off for like, five minutes?"

Chuubo flashed two thumbs up and went out into the rain with several eyebrow motions that turned Seizhi colors.

"Th-this about...what we talked about?" Seizhi asked, heart hammering in their chest.

"Mmhm." Stella crossed the room and took Seizhi's hands in her own scarred ones. Seizhi could see individual stars falling in her eyes. "...You like those comics I left you?"

A mute nod.

"Then shall we meet in Bluebell Park?"


End file.
